UK museum exhibits 3500-year-old disposable cup that may have served wine

A museum in the UK is about to display two cups - one made of clay crafted 3,500 years ago and another which came to use since the 1990s (paper cup). The newly discovered ancient cup may have held wine before it was thrown out after an ancient party on the island of Crete, assume researchers. The vessels are united as they represent the single-use dishes used across centuries. The Minoans dumped thousands of the clay vessels as they built an advanced Bronze Age civilization marked by palaces, written language and lavish art claimed curator Julia Farley while speaking to the media.

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The men back then were just like us who didn't want to wash up, said Farley.

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Disposable cups from past & present

The Museum staff hope that the display will leave visitors thinking about the growing consequences of our love for the disposable. Farley said that the cups in one way show the universal desire for convenience. Yet right now humans are making more than 300 billion disposable paper cups every year as a species. And that's a whopping number, quoted Farley. 

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Significance of Minoan cup

The Minoan cup gis one of the hundreds in the British Museum's hoard of items on reserve, Farley said. John Valentine Salvage excavated the cup back in the 1950s and brought it to the museum. Farley said that though the cup is not finished or attractive it holds more historical significance than the other shinier objects in the museum.

Discards can tell us more about people's everyday lives, she said. And indeed the Minoan cup and its simplicity indicated a lot of facts about the bronze age. Handle-less, rough and covered in the fingerprints of whoever shaped it on a wheel, it seems to have been made in a hurry, Farley said.

Moreover, the sloppiness and the existence of so many similar objects in big dumps near palaces led researchers to believe it was meant for just one night of drinking. Farley assumed that perhaps the cups were the Minoans' way of streamlining cleanup for feasts that drew hundreds or thousands of guests. It also indicates a statement of wealth, given the resources required to mass-produce and then toss and that's why it's rare, the curator added.

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